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Expert's Corner: Quick Guide to Designing with SolarEdge

Submitted by kobi
on Tue, 10/25/2016 - 16:37

"With just a few basic principles, you can easily design systems with SolarEdge. Just remember that we design to power, not voltage or current and you will be on your way to simplifying your PV designs."

- Jeff Laughy, Field Applications Engineer

Top 3 things to consider to design residential systems with SolarEdge

1) Power Optimizer Compatibility: Power optimizers are designed for today's high power modules. We recently made some changes to the specifications that make it easier than ever to match them to your PV modules.

P300 - The Baseline: Designed for 60 cell modules

P320 - Designed for high power 60 cell modules

P400 - The Catch All: Designed for 72 cell modules but work with high power LG and SunPower modules as well

2) String Length: We design to power and not to voltage. With SolarEdge, there is no need to perform voltage calculations to determine string length. You just need 2 numbers: min and max string length:

Example: For 260 watt modules we divide 5,250/260 = 20.2. We round down to 20 for a max of 20 modules

3) Inverter Selection: SolarEdge offers up to 135% oversizing of its standard inverters and up to 155% on HD-Wave inverters. That means that for a 10,000 Wac standard inverter, you can add 13,500 watts of DC power. For minimum sizing, while there is no set requirement, SolarEdge recommends sizing of the inverters down to 50% of nameplate (ex: 5,000 watts of DC power using our 10,000 watt AC inverter).

While it is a common practice to always oversize traditional string inverters, this is less important for SolarEdge. Technically, the system will always keep the voltage fixed at 350Vdc meaning that there is no efficiency loss for undersizing. Financially, the inverters are very low cost and the optimizer costs scale directly with module count.

Many installers are now looking to standardize on just a few sizes to streamline their fleet. The SE7600 is a good example. This inverter can scale from 3,800 watts DC up to over 10,000 watts DC and will be upgradeable to StorEdge in the future if the owner ever wants to install batteries.

We hope that this helps simplify some of the design for SolarEdge. If you need more information: